The Indian telecom regulator, Trai revealed that in the Delhi-NCR region, Bharti Airtel is the provider which is offering the best 4G speeds to the users, and not Reliance Jio. Although Reliance Jio is the operator which falls in the second place, this test made it clear that the Mukesh Ambani-led telco is not the one providing the highest speeds. The test was conducted using the Independent Drive Test (IDT) method, which reported that in the regions of Delhi service area including Ghaziabad, Noida, Gurugram and Faridabad, Airtel was leading in the speed competition. The test was conducted between February 20 and March 16, and it covered a test route of 2300 kms. The data test evaluated 23 hotspots which spanned across the entire area of Delhi-NCR.

Specifically speaking about the test results, it was revealed that Airtel is offering a 4G speed of 8.9Mbps while Reliance Jio is lagging a little bit behind with 7.3Mbps speeds in the Delhi-NCR region. Vodafone India secured third place by providing an average speed of 4.9Mbps 4G downloads speeds. Speaking of the highest 4G upload speed by the carriers, Vodafone’s 4G network pegged a speed of 5.8Mbps, followed by Jio at 2.1Mbps, and Airtel secured the third position by providing 2.0Mbps upload speeds on 4G connectivity.

Like one would expect, the report revealed that website loading times were also significantly better on Airtel 4G as the network reported a loading time of 6.7 seconds (average time taken to load a tested webpage) in Delhi-NCR region. For Vodafone, the same number stood at 9 seconds while Jio reported time of 7.2 seconds. In the video streaming delay test also, Airtel showed the best results with 1.7 seconds of delay. Jio and Vodafone scored similarly in this test by reporting a delay of 2.6 and 2.7 seconds respectively.

Bharti Airtel also didn’t budge from its impressive speeds while testing switched to 2G networks. However, for 3G download speeds MTNL was on the top, Trai reported 3G download speed on MTNL was pegged at 3.7Mbps, which was closely followed by Airtel at 3.3Mbps, Vodafone showed a speed of 2.3Mbps on 3G, and Idea Cellular reported 2Mbps.

The report not only studies internet speeds, but it also highlighted that Delhi-NCR region saw only 2% drop call rate during the test period. The exception to this observation were except MTNL and Aircel, which reported higher call drop rates. The report showed that MTNL had a drop call rate of as much as 19.5% on 2G network, while Aircel had a drop call rate of 5.7%. MTNL also had the highest drop call rate of 8.3% on the 3G network.

Arpit spends his day closely following the telecom and tech industry. A music connoisseur and a night owl, he also takes a deep interest in the Indian technology start-up scene and spends rest of his time spilling poetry and stories on paper.